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Saturday, October 26, 2013

It has been nearly two years since Miracom sought Federal
Communications Commission approval for an app designed to help the deaf
use mobile phones.

The app, known as InnoCaption (pictured), allows deaf users to “hear” a person
talking on the end of a call with the help of a stenographer who
transcribes the conversation.

But Miracom needs FCC approval to gain access to a government fund that would allow deaf customers to use the app for free.

The
FCC, troubled that the $700 million fund has become riddled with fraud,
is refusing to grant any new companies access to the fund. In some
cases, the agency found, scammers were using phones meant for the deaf
to hide their identity. In others, doctors were paid to refer patients
to the service — whether they needed it or not.

The fund stands to
become heavily burdened as aging baby boomers join the 48 million
Americans who have some form of hearing loss. Fraud, therefore, is
something agency officials say that they can’t afford.

The FCC
declined to comment for this story, but in a January government filing
it said that fraud puts the fund “in jeopardy and threatens to deprive
people who are deaf or hard of hearing of the benefits of the program.”

Deaf
community advocates worry that the FCC’s delays are hindering progress
that is critical for those who have trouble hearing as the world
increasingly moves to mobile technology. “The more competition you have
in the field, the better,” said Lise Hamlin, director of public policy
at the Hearing Loss Association of America. “There’s no motivation to
get better.”

That’s certainly a worry for Miracom. The company’s
investors are growing impatient, and company executives say they are
worried that it will have to kill the app.

“The product would go
away, the opportunity would go away,” said Chuck Owen, chief operating
officer of Miracom. “We do want to provide this service, but not at all
costs.”

The Interstate Telecommunications Relay Services Fund’s fraud problems came to light in 2012.
The fund pays for technology that allows the deaf to speak to other
users through live operators or computer software that transmits their
conversations in real time. Miracom, Sprint, AT&T, Purple and other
service providers are reimbursed for every minute of a relay call.

Some
providers have given out special captioned phones for free to those who
didn’t need them, according to government filings. Others were paying
audiologists who referred patients to the captioned telephone program
against suggested guidelines.

The FCC also found that the service
was attracting scammers who want to avoid the cost of making a call or
disguise their identity. (The transcriptionists at the center of the
calls are prohibited from revealing what they hear or alerting
authorities if they suspect a crime.)

In May, AT&T paid an
$18.3 million fine after the FCC accused the company of failing to
adequately verify the identities of those registering for the phones.
The registration process, the agency said, made it too easy for foreign
scammers to use the phones to buy goods with stolen credit card numbers.
In a complaint filed by the Justice Department
at the time, the government said the fraudulent calls accounted for up
to 95 percent of AT&T’s call volume paid for through the fund.

That
type of fraud helped prompt an explosion of demand for the fund, which
is supported by fees from approved service providers. This was
especially pronounced in the area of Internet-supported services, in
which the FCC saw spending on Internet caption services rise from $40 million in the first half of 2012 to $70 million in the second half.

At the current growth rate, the FCC expects the overall fund to reach $1 billion by the middle of 2014.
The FCC has become sensitive to the appearance of fraud in its
public programs after it faced scrutiny this year for Lifeline, known as
the Obama phone program. It subsidizes phone costs for low-income
Americans, but investigators found that it was being used by people who
did not qualify.

To keep the telecommunications relay fund from
running into similar problems, the FCC has proposed an overhaul in the
way the fund is run, including prohibiting service providers from paying
doctors who refer patients to the service and requiring customers to
provide registration information.

The FCC has proposed new rules to address fraud, but has not scheduled a final vote.

Meanwhile,
members of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community have become
frustrated with the delays. Technology advances have made instant
communication the norm, while they suffer through clunky conversations
with captioned land-line phones or inaccurate voice-recognition
software.

Miracom says its app would be helpful to people such as
Mark Hope, a program manager for the U.S. Navy. He had to evacuate his
office at the Washington Navy Yard during last month’s shooting. Hope,
who has been mostly deaf since birth, said a captioned mobile phone
would have let him communicate more quickly with colleagues and
emergency personnel.

Hope told The Washington Post in an e-mail
that he would have been able to “call 911 and quickly get proper
directions without any mix-up or miscommunication as would otherwise be
the case.” Also, he said, he would have been able to better reassure his
family that he was unharmed, rather than communicating by text and
e-mail, which drained his phone’s battery.

“The one true benefit
of InnoCaption is the peace of mind and the reassurance that your
communication with loved ones will be easily and quickly accessible,” he
said.

As the world becomes more dependent on cellphones, deaf
community activists say, technology that allows the deaf and hard of
hearing to use mobile devices is becoming critical.

“From my
perspective, I don’t know whether InnoCaption is end all and be all, but
the concept of a mobile caption system is hugely important,” said
Hamlin, of the Hearing Loss Association of America. “You can’t text message a tow company.”

About Me

I am full-time Mass Communication faculty at Towson University in Maryland and adjunct faculty in the City University of New York (CUNY) Master's in Disability Studies program.
I research media and disability issues and wrote a 2010 book on the subject: Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media, published by Advocado Press.
The media have real power to define what the public knows about disability and that's what I research.